My Writerly Blog

Me, lately I spent my PhD years going to many, many  conferences. When you're in a small department in an isolated part of the world, they're kind of a necessity. You go to meet anyone - anyone  - who is doing similar stuff, and who won't stare at you blankly when you describe your research. You go to try out your ideas, to make sure the academic community you'll be pitching them to don't think you're an absolute waste of space ( imposter syndrome is for real). Also, you go just to go somewhere (though I think I went to Leicester far too often). In the last few years, as I've gained contacts and confidence, I've gone to fewer and fewer conferences. I know the ones that best suit me now, and where I'll get to meet and/or catch up with my peeps. I also know the ones, of course, where I've never made any headway at all. I was pleasantly surprised this week to be wrong about that last one. MIX Digital - Bath Spa University Let me back thi...

I'm on the long train(s) ride home from Kent after a one-day digital fiction workshop with Andy Campbell ( Dreaming Methods ).  It's the first time I've met Andy IRL - great to put a face to the name & works. The workshop itself was set up by Peggy at East Kent Live Lit , funded by the Kent Arts Council, and she was graceful enough to let a non-Kent-resident such as me sit in.  Most of the attendees were not necessarily new to digital fiction, but new to building it.  They were writers, musicians, installation artists, and sometimes a combination of the above.  Almost everyone save me and one other had been able to make the Friday evening session, which was an overview of digital fiction and some of Andy's background. The morning session covered a few examples of dig-fic (from the Poole Literary Festival New Media Prize ), recommended software (more on this in a minute), and resources for media files (more...).  The afternoon session was more hands-on building of di...

I've finally done it. I have entered nerdhood, via the rather embarrassing route of sustaining a significant injury from too much time spent in front of a computer screen. My osteopath was beside herself. It was time well spent, however, as I managed to update my entire website, form the platform for my work in the next few years, and gain a lot more knowledge about the software I'll be using to create my digital stories. But the truly interesting thing I learned by using new software and rebuilding my site from the ground up was this: I need better pencils. As it turns out, I'm rather crap at designing unless I have a pencil (not a pen) and paper. I couldn't even begin putting the pages together until I had thumbnail sketches and hastily drawn scribbles and lists in a notebook in front of me. My sole mechanical pencil broke one evening, and I found myself unable to continue working. In a related episode, I attended a lecture this week that was not up ...

This is the presentation Amy Chambers and I gave at the Transliteracy Conference, complete with annotations for those who weren't there to hear us rush through the topic in our short allotted time. Visualizing the Story from Text to Screen on Prezi

I went up to the Edinburgh Festival last week, mostly to hear Neil Gaiman read (yes, again). It also meant that I bought far too many books, more than I'd given myself leave to purchase. I should have expected it, of course, but there you go. The to-be-read stack next to my place at the dining room table is now quite towering and somewhat precarious, but it's full of good stuff. The first thing I read was my new copy of Gaiman's Neverwhere , which was different from my current crap edition in that he'd compiled and edited the various British and American versions that were out there to create the "Author's Preferred Text." How could I not get it, when even the non-author's preferred text is one of my favorite books of all time, and the reason I'm writing what I'm writing, studying what I'm studying? That thing fracking launched me. Anyway, it's been a while since I read an "adult" Gaiman book, what with the recent popular...

I was invited to sit in on a talk today in the School of Computer Sciences. Yes, I was the only woman there. We won't dwell on that. What I will dwell on is my introduction to this totally rad geek toy. I'm not a computer scientist, not even a computer expert on an amateur level. I'm more of a high-end user: I love finding out what I can do with my electronic devices, and playing with them, but I don't (yet?) have in-depth knowledge like programming, building, hacking, anything like that. I might just want to learn now, however. The talk started by introducing something that it seems a lot of electronic geeks know and use already: the Arduino . The Arduino, and many devices like it, is a small electronic device, essentially a little computer, consisting of a tiny processor, a serial port, a power port, a USB port, and two sets of digital (one can also do analog) input/output switches. You build a program on your computer, feed it into the Arduino, hook it up to som...